Tech Time Warp of the Week: AT&T’s Experiments Ad, 1974

Bells chime as blue lights flicker against a dark background, but only for moment. The blue lights vanish, and suddenly, two all-American kids appear, playing in a park with one of those toy telephones you can make with some string and a pair of paper cups.

And if that doesn’t grab your attention, wait for the split-screen action: blue lights and kids playing telephone at the same time!

But then that’s gone too. The scene shifts to a group of teenaged high school students wearing high-waisted pants and turtlenecks as they walk through the lobby of some enormous building meant to look like the future. Yes, it’s the 1970s, and as it turns out, these teenagers are touring Bell Labs, the AT&T research operation that drove the creation of countless communication and computing technologies in the second of half of the 20th century.

“This is one of the places where we research and develop the communications systems of the future,” the narrator says.

What does that have to do with kids playing telephone in a park? That’s a very good question, and it won’t be completely answered until you get to the end of this seven-minute AT&T advertorial, entitled Experiments (see video above). Yeah, it’s kinda strange, and yeah, the payoff is a long time in coming. But that’s the way they rolled in the ’70s — and we loved every minute of it.

Clearly, with its two intercut story lines, the film is trying to drive home a theme: Good things come when you experiment with, well, communication systems. But there’s a second message that rises to the surface. Eventually.

Inside the hallowed halls of Bell Labs, those high-schoolers see plenty of cutting-edge innovating going on. They get lessons on microwave towers and cables that can carry 90,000 phone calls at the same time, not to mention Picturephone chats. They even get a glimpse of the future: high-frequency radiowaves that can carry 250,000 calls and 2,400 Picturephone chats.

The Picturephone was a dud that almost no one ever used, but so it goes. The stranger bit is that the film keeps cutting back and forth between Bell Labs and those kids in the park.

There are three kids in all. A boy in a red baseball cap turned backwards is watching his friend — a chubby kid with glasses — pore over plans for his telephone, and not too far away, a girl is walking alone, sucking on a lollipop and wondering whether the boys will finally let her in on their shenanigans. Naturally, they don’t, and she pledges revenge.

She watches the boys fumble with their play telephone. They can’t quite pull the string through the hole at the bottom of the cup, and they don’t realize they’re supposed to knot the string to keep it in place — stuff you’d know if someone had taught you to sew. “There’s got to be an easier way to do this,” says the kid with glasses.

There is, but first we cut back to Bell Labs. “These scientists are conducting an experiment using laser light to transmit voice over optical fiber,” the narrator says. “Of course, we have to solve many problems.” You’ll notice, however, that there’s not a single female engineer who can help solve these problems.

Ah, but among the high-schoolers touring the lab, there are plenty of interested girls. And when we cut back to the park, guess who fixes the toy telephone? Here’s a hint: She’s wearing AT&T colors.